The Rise & Fall Of America’s Great Company with William D. Cohan

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1:34Hello, I'm Anthony Scaramucci, and this is Open Book, where I talk with some of the brightest minds out there about everything surrounding the written word, from authors and historians to figures in entertainment, neuroscientists, political activists, and of course, Wall Street. Sorry, I can't resist. Before we get into today's episode, if you haven't already, please hit follow or subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave us a review. We all love a review, even the bad ones. I want to hear the parts you're enjoying or how we can do better. You know I can roll with the punches, so let me know.

2:07Anyways, let's get to it.

2:16Now, Bill Cohen has written some great business books. He's one of the best. I am a big fan, and I am lucky enough to call him a friend. In this conversation, however, we go into his most personal book and actually my favorite non-business book of his. The title of the book is Four Friends, Promising Lives Cut Short, which is an enormously powerful, tragic read. Bill writes with great compassion about the lives of four of his friends, including JFK Jr. and President Harry Truman's grandson, Will Daniel. I want to bring this title to people's attention because ultimately it's inspiring. And as I can never resist business, we of course discuss Power Failure, his new bestselling book on the incredible rise and fall of General Electric.

3:15So joining us now is William D. Cohen. He's a multiple New York Times bestselling author, and we could talk about so many different things. But for today, we're going to talk about two of his books. I've read every one of your books, Bill. One of my personal favorites is Four Friends, so we have to bring that up. Four Friends, Promising Lives Cut Short, which was a short book, but a brilliant book. And I want to talk about the humanity of that book. And then your recent New York Times bestseller, Power Failure, The Rise and Fall of an American icon, which of course is the most amazing story about one of our greatest industrial companies, General Electric.

3:52And so first of all, welcome to the show. And it's great to have you on. Great to be here as always, Anthony, with you. And also you're writing now for Puck, where you own your own equity in Puck as a writer, which is super exciting. Where can people find your writing on Puck? Let's start there and then we'll get into the books. Sure. I mean, Puck.news is sort of where you go to read all of the Puck writers. And then you can sign up for our biweekly missives to make sure they sort of come into your email box. Now, it ain't free, Anthony. Oh, I'm a subscriber, brother. I got all of you guys. I bought the whole rainbow of you guys.

4:35And it shouldn't be free. The content is so good. you have to pay sometimes. You get what you pay for in life. I want to talk about your career as a backdrop to these books that you've been writing. I think one of the most interesting things about your career, at least for me, is that you were an investment banker. You worked in financial services for many years. And so not only do you have an outsider's objective journalist window into the industry, you were an insider. I think it was 17 years. Tell us about your career, how you got started in the transition into writing? Well, I had no intention, of course, of being an investment banker.

5:12I was a history major in college and wanted to be a journalist because I thought that was the way you changed the world. I wrote my thesis in college about the French existentialists and how they changed their circumstances during World War II. And so that made a big impression on me. And the way they did that was Anthony was becoming journalists. So I thought, okay, I will do the same thing. And I thought for sure, I would just go to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal immediately after graduating from college. And believe it or not, that did not happen. And so I had to make my way into the world.

5:53But I was a journalist first in upstate New York, then I went to Columbia Journalism School, Then I went back to Raleigh, North Carolina and covered public education in Wake County, North Carolina for two years, won some investigative reporting awards, then decided, OK, for sure now I've got to get to The Wall Street Journal. This will be a no brainer for The Wall Street Journal. They still wouldn't hire me. My father was pushing me to get my MBA. I didn't really want my an MBA. That's not where my head was at. But I thought, well, if I have an MBA and a degree from journalism school and awards, then the Wall Street Journal will hire me, Anthony.

6:35And I did that. I got my MBA from Columbia, graduated in 1987. The Journal still would not hire me. All you had to do on Wall Street to get a job in May of 87 was to be able to fog a mirror. And I could do that. That explains my entire career right there. See that? I'm a mirror fogger. There you go. That's right. We both are. We both came up at the same time. And that's it. I got, you know, I thought, all right, well, if the journal is not going to hire me, I'm not my journalism career is over. I'm going to go to Wall Street. And I got my first job, you know, of all things, financing leverage buyouts at G Capital in New York City.

7:18Absurd as that was, I'd been, you know, I had no background for that. No, no reason they should have hired me, but they did. And then you liked it though, right? Or you didn't like it? Sure. I mean, you know, it was, it was incredibly interesting. I mean, GE Capital was a fascinating place and a GE was, you know, obviously, you know, and then I wrote this book about it, but back then, you know, it was the hot place to be and leveraged bios. I mean, it was just incredibly exciting. My learning curve was astronomical. And, you know, I'm not saying I was the best investment banker ever. A lot of people have said I was not definitely not.

7:54But, you know, I learned a lot from the inside, first about finance and then about M &A advice and Wall Street politics and, you know, the Wall Street horse race. You know what those things are like. It's not for the faint of heart, that's for sure. Yeah, no, it's a super aggressive place. But I want to take you way back now. you went to Phillips Andover Academy. This is in, it's a suburb in North Boston, I guess. How far is it from Boston? About 30 minutes by bus. Yeah, but it's, it's North of the city, right? Northwest of the city. It is. It wouldn't be mistaken for a suburb of Boston though.

8:35It's, you know, it's near the New Hampshire. Yeah, it's a separate entity, but it's up there. I'm trying to, I'm trying to set the scene for people that may not know Andover as well as you and I do. I've been to the campus. It's absolutely breathtaking. Some of our presidents have been on that campus. It is one of the greatest boarding schools in the history of American boarding schools. You attended that boarding school. You had four friends that you attended that boarding school with, Jack Berman, Will Daniel, Harry Bull, John F. Kennedy Jr., obviously the most well-known name of those, but all four of those men, young men, I should say, you got to meet at an early age.

9:14So you wrote this book, Four Friends. Why did you write the book about these men? And tell us a little bit about that story and your rite of passage as you were growing up and becoming an adult. So, I mean, not to, you know, spoiler alert, but each of these four men who I knew well, but for a short period of time, obviously the four years more or less that we were together at Andover. And this was a time, Anthony, before cell phones, before social media, before it was easy to keep in touch with people, you know, once you were no longer in their physical presence, as I like to say, you know, guys don't write guys letters that often.

9:56So, you know, I knew them well and intensely at that time. And then, you know, we went and kind of went our separate ways to college, to our early careers, et cetera. And unfortunately, you know, sadly, each of these four guys ended up dying young and tragically. And so, you know, that was something that sort of carried with me for many years. Do you have survivor? Do you have survivor's guilt? No, no, because, you know, I had nothing to do with their unfortunate tragic deaths, obviously, but I knew them. They were my friends and I did know them and I'd more lost touch with more or less with some of them.

10:31But, you know, I only knew them from that period of time. And so, you know, occasionally I'd run into them. Of course, I'd run into JFK Jr., you know, on the streets of Manhattan. But I wanted to know more about them. I wanted to pay homage to them and their lives, their short lives. Why though? And by the way, there's no way you can spoil this book because I knew the ending of the book. The book is rich with a complex understanding of the human condition. And one thing that you and I both know, and I've actually learned a lot of this from you, and it's in this book, there's chance and circumstance, and there's so many things and variables that are outside of your control.

11:10You know, you don't pick central Massachusetts as a place of your origin, not saying that you wouldn't, it's a beautiful place, and perhaps you had a great childhood, but you, you know, you didn't pick it. You landed there from wherever we are all coming in from. Trust me, the, uh, we, we had a family motto in the Scaramucci family. Let's keep the word fun and the word dysfunctional. So we had a dysfunctional blue collar family beating the living daylights out of each other on Webster Avenue. But here you are, and you're writing about this. These guys didn't pick their lives. Uh, and yet they had this, uh, some cases, halos, in some cases, pitchforks, and they had things about their lives that I think affected them, perhaps led to their tragedies.

11:49Do I have that right? You know, obviously, right. I mean, the tragic circumstances in each case were, you know, impossible to foresee or to expect. And many, in many cases, sort of wrong place at the wrong time. The stories are incredible, you know, stories of how they got to Andover, the stories of what they did after they left Andover. I mean, but, you know, you could say that John Kennedy Jr. never had a normal life. He was the first and only child ever born, you know, into a family that was living at the White House. So he was constantly on display. You know, his life was completely abnormal.

12:32He was, you know, obviously incredibly handsome and fun. Talk about fun to be with, but, you know, did things that were, you know, reckless, what I came to realize and fully appreciate and piloting a plane that was beyond his capabilities on a very foggy, you know, hazy summer night was probably not the best decision he ever made, obviously the worst. So could that have been foreseen? I mean, possibly, but, you know, I think it's just goes to Anthony, the fragility of life, which is something we all know deep in our guts and our souls, but we don't like to think about it very much. And I thought I would write this book as a way to get at some of those existential issues of our existence, getting back to, you know, my understanding and appreciation and respect for the French existential philosophers.

13:25So it's all kind of a piece, if you will. I'm going to go over these lies. I won't give up the whole book, but I'll go over the lies for a second. You had Jake Berman. He's a child of Holocaust survivors. He's the unfortunate victim of a rampage shooting in San Francisco. Which I might add gave us the 10-year ban on the assault weapons, AK-47s, which expired in 2004, unfortunately. And we're still living, you know, 20 years later with the after effects of letting that law expire and that ban expire. Right. And we both know that over that 10-year ban, these mass shootings and the fatalities associated with them.

14:03Well, during the ban, they went down. From 94 to 04, the fatalities went down. I mean, so we do know we can prevent these. We can reduce mortalities and fatalities. So why we're allowing this to persist on literally a daily basis is the American. It's unconscionable to me. It's one of the greatest frustrations of our current political system that they have such indifference to this, you know. um uh will will daniel a grandson of president harry truman he meets his demise by uh getting hit by a taxi cab on park avenue yeah i mean will uh was a brilliant guy who was very conflicted about his upbringing his not only was he a grandson of harry truman his mother was margaret truman daniel his father was managing editor the new york times clifton daniel uh this is a guy who You know, Will could have done anything he wanted.

14:57He was very conflicted about his family and his privilege and was a bit of a lost soul. um you know even into his 40s had been you know returning from a party at like two in the morning that he'd gone to in brooklyn going back to his mother's apartment on park avenue when you know he crossed the street at two in the morning and got hit by a cab uh you know very very sad and a waste of of you know great intelligence and a low-key guy the way you describe him though you know he didn't he didn't thrust his uh background or who he was in anybody's face really right you know never unlike unlike john kennedy could jfk jr couldn't get away from it right couldn't avoid it couldn't avoid it nobody knew that will daniel was uh clifton daniel's son or harry truman's grandson right you know uh harry ball he's the heir to the his family's great fortune uh he drowns with his two daughters on a sailing trip to lake michigan no i mean that's like the saddest thing you could possibly ever imagine it just you know uh and you know i interviewed his so a widow who i didn't really know uh and just can you imagine even though the events had happened you know 20 18 or 20 years earlier you know sitting and talking to her in her chicago suburban home and here you know hearing her relive the stories and and seeing the shrine that she had sort of built to him in the basement.

16:35I mean, it was incredibly moving and powerful and just shocking and tragic. Yeah. And again, young and, you know, it's just one of these things. So, you know, you and I, obviously, we're reasonably well read. We read Sophocles and Aeschylus and all these tragic stories. And then, of course, we're faced with these in our life, right? Because this is this short life with mortality around us and our own mortality. Let's go to Jack Kennedy's son, John F. Kennedy Jr. We had Carol Radziwell on to talk about her book a few weeks ago. As you remember, she was married to Anthony Radziwell, who died of testicular cancer three weeks after John.

17:14Of course, nobody was expecting John to die. He was a very healthy, vigorous guy. But Anthony was stricken with cancer for a decade. But he's an iconic figure to me. I remember him, and he's a couple of years older than me, But I remember him being on the cover of People magazine, Bill, and he was the sexiest man alive. He was a couple of years older than me. And let's just face it, he was a chick magnet. OK, we'll just call it that. I don't know if you're allowed to do that anymore due to political correctness, but he was. Tell us a little about him. Tell us a little about your interaction with him, your feelings towards him.

17:49well uh you know i he was a uh a junior and or we used to call uppers when i was a senior uh i was one of his blue key advisors he was in my dorm the reason he was in my dorm is because my dorm was next to the andover inn he still had secret service protection at that time being under 16 during part of that time. And so the Secret Service was in the Andover Inn next door, you know, to try to provide a, you know, a sense of quote unquote security for John. And so he was in my dorm and we just became friendly. You know, everybody sort of wanted to be, you know, around him, just magnetic, you know, physically and personality wise, just a lot of fun.

18:38And yeah, everybody, you know, he was, I mean, an unbelievable draw for people. And so, I mean, we just became friendly through that year and a little bit afterwards. And I mean, of all the people, obviously, he's the one we all feel like we know ever since saluting his father's coffin, knowing he's three years old. You know, that is one of those iconic images in American history and the tragedy of that. You know, he would invite me occasionally over to his apartment on Fifth Avenue and meet his mother. And, you know, and of course, being from Massachusetts, you know, the Kennedy name was akin to papal supremacy.

19:21I mean, it was. I mean, listen, it was. I mean, look, I mean, it was American royalty. I mean, even for blue collar kids in Port Washington on Long Island. I mean, the Kennedys had a glamour. They had a glitz to them, but they also had a regality in terms of the way they held themselves. They were good looking people. And, you know, John Kennedy was quite charismatic and thoughtful in terms of what he was trying to do as the American president. And, you know, what happens with tragedy, though, Bill, you're a great writer, but tragedy has a tendency to magnify things, doesn't it? Tragedy has a tendency to increase the intensity of our emotional experience to the story, right?

20:01Happy endings are great, but tragedy, there's a pathos to it that sort of tugs at our heartstrings. Am I right? Well, you're absolutely right. And I think tragedy allows us to learn more than happy endings do. I know happy endings are very useful for places like Disney animation, but tragedy helps us learn who we are as people and the reality of our circumstances. as human beings, the finite nature of our existence. And they say that nothing focuses the mind at night like, you know, an execution in the morning, Anthony. And we're all sort of facing our own demise. No one gets out alive. And I think that fact alone adds a certain sense of urgency, especially as you get older to your life.

20:56And again, going back to the existential philosophers who preach this idea of living every day of your life as though it would be your last. You know, that's a very hard thing to do in practice. If that were the case, I'd be, you know, eating macaroni and cheese all day long because, you know, that's my final meal if I can manage it. And so, you know, you just have to do the best you can. And that's sort of how I think about, you know, my life as a writer now, too, is, you know, trying to kind of do as much as I can because, you know, I wasn't meant to be a writer. Nobody wanted me to be a writer.

21:34My teacher at Andover, I went back in writing this book, Anthony, and got all of my teacher reports and housemaster reports about my existence at Andover during those four years, which was quite eye-opening, I must say. And one of them was from my English competence teacher in ninth grade, who basically said, you're a terrible writer, you're a lousy writer. I hope you're not ever thinking about becoming a writer because that will be a major league dead end for you. So nobody wanted me to do this. And I wasn't, if I hadn't been fired by J.B. Morgan Chase in 2004, I'd probably still be an investment banker.

22:13So I see this as sort of a blessing and I take advantage of it all day, every day. And that's why I write as much as I try to and write long, big books. Well, I love the book. I mean, I guess because we're contemporaries and there was something in that book that made me realize our fatality more than I typically do. Maybe we're both getting older. I don't know. But it just made me think about, you know, we're here. I took my wife, Deirdre, to the Acropolis a few weeks ago. We were up at the Parthenon, and I was walking the Parthenon thinking of Pericles. He was there 2 ,500 years ago. And so you think it's a long time ago, Bill, but if you think in generations, it's only 100 people are separating us from Pericles because each generation is 25 years.

23:02And so when you think about it that way, there's really just 100 generations between us and Pericles, and yet they're long gone. The Acropolis is barely standing when you look at it and will be long gone. And as the Greeks would say even the stars have a beginning and an end. And so we have to accept that. And I do think it brightens our life weirdly for some of us. Maybe some of us get depressed over it, but a lot of us, it brightens our life. It makes our life almost more exciting to live. It makes our life more vibrant, more the colors are more vivid. But I appreciate you writing this book.

23:31I wanted to talk about it today and recommend it to people for Friends, Promising Lives Cut Short, because there's so much richness to the book about our humanity. I'm going to switch subjects abruptly to something you're really good at, Bill, which is writing about business and writing about the characters in business. I was first introduced to your writing when you wrote the book about Bear Stearns, which I thought was an amazing book. Did you win the FT Business Book Award for that one? I can't remember. You won it for one of them. I wrote it for my first book about Lazard. Okay. Yeah. I read that as well.

24:03I read the Bear Stearns book first. Then I had to go back and read the Lazard book. And then of course I read the Goldman book and so on. But let's go to Power Failure. You're writing about this company, which has been in our lives for, let's call it the modern era of America. General Electric has been with us the whole time. Tell us about it. The Economist said it was one of the best books in 2022, New York Times bestseller. Tell us about it. Why write it? What do we don't know about GE that you think we need to know? Well, as you said, Anthony, it's an iconic company founded in 1892 in part through a merger.

24:44It was founded through a merger of Thomas Edison's company along with another company that was owned and run by a guy named Charles Coffin, who became the first CEO of GE. GE has mythologized Thomas Edison and its DNA, and he certainly formed one of the two strands of the DNA, but he didn't want the merger. It was forced upon him by the big-time bankers at that time, a guy named J.P. Morgan and another guy named Henry Ballard, who was the CEO of Edison's company and had been a train, a railroad mogul, and then the venture capitalists in Boston that were backing Coffin's company. So, I mean, right from the get-go, Anthony, you've got sort of this M &A overlay, this money man overlay that created this company and made it a dominant force in American life.

25:35And, you know, you have this incredible history of the company led by, you know, these quote-unquote great men leading up to Jack Welch. And one of the things that I really sort of have taken to heart. You know, Charles de Gaulle once said that graveyards are filled with indispensable men. And, you know, I always think about that. And not only does it tie into my Four Friends book, but, you know, even my book about, you know, Lazard, when I was at Lazard, I mean, you know, Felix Rohden and Michel David Vey were ruling the ruse. Now they're both, you know, in the graveyards. And they seem so powerful and so compelling.

26:12And, you know, we lived sort of in fear of them. And so, you know, Jack Welch is now passed, even though, you know, I was fortunate enough to spend many hours with him, interviewing him about his life and what he was trying to do at GE and what he accomplished at GE and what some failures were that led to the company's downfall. And so I just thought it was this incredible story, Anthony, of the rise and fall of one of the great American companies, one that, you know, helped define the era of American capitalism in the 20th century. And just to show you how, again, fleeting things are, even though you think they'll be around forever.

26:52I mean, Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, talks about creative destructionism. And, you know, the seeds probably of GE's both rise and its fall were implanted, right from the start in 1892. And I found that just fascinating and riveting. And I thought it was having worked there, having worked at GE Capital, having, believe it or not, my office made at GE Capital. I was a guy named John Flannery who went on to succeed Jeff Immelt for 15 months, sadly, as the CEO of GE. I mean, it just became one of these stories I couldn't resist writing. You know, the reason I'm smiling, you're listening to you talk is that, you know, GE, I was at a speech, Allen and Company, at the Sun Valley Conference year 2000.